Chris Harris on... the Maserati MC20

This article was first published in Issue 358 of Top Gear magazine (April 2022)

In a couple of days I am going to drive a new car I know very little about. It is called the Maserati MC20 and it must be the most sparsely promoted product I’ve ever tested. There was some live web show 18 months ago in Italy watched by about 50 people, and David Beckham appears to have fishily acquired some excellent drifting skills in one. But apart from that, I’m in the dark. And that makes me very happy indeed.

Cars and marketing have always been inseparable, but for too long the power within car companies has been focused on those who deliver message rather than those who make great cars. Well, there seems to have been a change of heart at Maserati because it appears to have spent about £36 promoting what must be the most exciting sports car it has made since the 250F in 1954. I think we have to assume the rest has been lavished on the way it drives. Boy, does that sound good.

Was it the early Nineties Vauxhall Corsa that sweated under a billion dollar advertising budget? A fleet of supermodels sat on them and in them and drove them and it probably did help flog a few more than expected. But then GM Europe fully jumped the shark with the Vectra – and I might need correcting here – by openly boasting that the marketing budget exceeded what had been spent bringing the car to market. Meantime Ford went the opposite way and spent the money making its Mondeo a fantastic machine to drive. The Vectra was a dog log from behind the wheel and that was probably the beginning of Vauxhall’s decline in the UK. When the marketing department becomes too powerful, bad things happen.

Car companies are so marketing driven that they will find ways to spend vast amounts of money on, well, marketing.

I’ve always found this strange because there are many examples of cars that succeeded with very little promotion. Outside of North America, the Porsche 911 rarely appeared in any adverts. Porsche just didn’t see the need. This was, after all, the company that chose to ignore its marketing department when it said that the proposed 1973 model year car with the weird rear spoiler would never sell. The enthusiasts won the argument and the 2.7 RS went on to be one of the greats.

Have you ever seen an advert for a Ferrari? Nope. An Ariel Atom? Not a chance.

And now Maserati has joined the club. There’s something refreshingly confident about a car company saying, “You know where we are, you can watch or read the reviews and if you want a test drive we’ll do our best.” It makes Maserati look like it knows it has a winner on its hands. Of course, I could be completely wrong, and this could be another parts bin mess like so many Maseratis from the past 20 years. But even if that does turn out to be the case, the way it has been launched in near-silence has intrigued me and, I suspect, many others.

Read TG's Maserati MC20 review by clicking these blue words.